How to Lose Money • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Lose Money

#111

Post by CoffeePython » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #100

CoffeePython wrote: post #83

Building an online course[1] has been one of the easiest ways to make money in my personal experience. Other things I've tried building: SaaS, Trades business, Freelancing business. I've made over $8k since I launched last month and it's been a great stepping stone into other ideas. The main problem I see going forward is getting consistent traffic. Building the course was the "easy" part and now I'm focusing hard on…

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you got to the frontpage of HN the first time you posted your site which presumably generated the bulk of that 8k, right? If you hit the jackpot (I.e. front page of HN) on your first try, yes it's going to feel like it's super easy to make money off building a course.

Yes I did get to the front page of HN. It generated around $2800 worth of revenue. The largest chunk for sure.

Lots of traffic also came from: reddit, word of mouth, FastAPI sponsorship, twitter, and indiehackers.

Re: How to Lose Money

#112

Post by base698 » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

notyourday wrote: post #93

dannyw wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier last year around May, when the stock market seemed to pick up after the COVID crash, I purchased a number of deep OTM LEAPs (long expiry options; until early this year). They were incredibly cheap. I often had trouble finding a market maker for those. I only chucked about $2000 in, but these options have grossed $15,000 in realised returns and $25,000 in unrealised returns. Options allowed me to make a “bet”…

I think it is rather well known since Taleb's book came out that deep OTM options, including LEAPs tend to be mispriced as there's just not enough data to model better pricing.

I know a lot of people here probably have read Talebs book. A far larger amount of them have read /r/wallstreetbets

Re: How to Lose Money

#113

Post by xxs » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

roland35 wrote: post #75

zuhayeer wrote: post #9

School is such a guaranteed one now during Covid – you don't even get social serendipity. You're literally sitting there on Zoom burning through cash. What common folk don't realize is that college is just a luxury consumption good of the rich.

This may be true for some degrees, but I feel like my engineering degrees were worth it and would still be worth it online. I feel like I could have gotten at least 75% of the value of my education online, especially with my Master's degree (both in Electrical Engineering). For me at least the value of my engineering degrees was in learning the fundamental approaches to solving problems, and most of my classes were l…

Electrical Engineer w/o a lab to practice is rather hard - I guess nowadays people can start with microcontrollers instead but that's a far cry from EE.

Re: How to Lose Money

#114

Post by TheMagicHorsey » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:27 PM UTC

Or you can think for yourself and lose money too.

I thought I was very smart and did a DCF analysis of TSLA for myself. Looked into the assumptions, and convinced myself that even in the most bullish case, the revenues and profits generated by TSLA would not justify a valuation above 500B dollars.

I have now lost about the price of a TSLA Model S on paper, and still have not closed out my TSLA short. I should have just bought a TSLA instead of shorting TSLA.

The saddest part is, even if TSLA corrects I'll only make a few tens of thousands of dollars ... and I have in jeopardy hundreds of thousands.

Stupidest move of my entire life.

If my crypto portfolio had not 4Xed this year I would be in real trouble with my wife. Sometimes I feel like its the same trend in the market blessing me and cursing me at the same time.

Re: How to Lose Money

#115

Post by CoffeePython » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:27 PM UTC

bmitc wrote: post #99

CoffeePython wrote: post #83

Building an online course[1] has been one of the easiest ways to make money in my personal experience. Other things I've tried building: SaaS, Trades business, Freelancing business. I've made over $8k since I launched last month and it's been a great stepping stone into other ideas. The main problem I see going forward is getting consistent traffic. Building the course was the "easy" part and now I'm focusing hard on…

I have thought about making a course on Udemy or Pluralsight. Did you consider those options before building your own? I am curious because I don’t think I have the skills to create something as nice as you did and also would like to know the pros and cons you discovered.

Yeah I did consider those but didn't like the revenue share model. I think if you create a course you should keep the majority of the revenue.

I'm building an alternative for programmers to build and sell interactive courses directly to their audience.[1] One thing I realized from the vim course was people loved the interactivity part. (you can check out a video of the lesson authoring tool here[2]).

It's currently just a lot of work to build something that looks nice, setup stripe, setup hosting, setup the interactive components, setup remote code execution, etc. I'm abstracting that away so people can focus on content creation and marketing/selling the course instead.

[1] https://www.slip.so

[2] https://twitter.com/KennethCassel/status/1356578440015716352...

Re: How to Lose Money

#116

Post by base698 » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:29 PM UTC

d--b wrote: post #46

Shorting call options also has a nice feature: there is no limit to how much you can lose. But really, what this article misses is a tip about leverage! Whatever your plan to lose money is, make sure you're leveraged. So that you can lose X time the amount you would lose if you only put your own money on the line. Eventually, you'll quickly lose much more than you had in the first place!

He's missing optionality too. Most of things he picked have a non linear upside. On the one side you write internet articles about books being unprofitable and on the other you're Stephen King.

Re: How to Lose Money

#117

Post by optimalsolver » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:29 PM UTC

If he's in, I'm in!

Re: How to Lose Money

#118

Post by mattmaroon » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:29 PM UTC

metafunctor wrote: post #96

yreg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Year ago when we were reading the news about what is happening in Wuhan, some of my friends bought SPY puts as an insurance against the potential crisis. The best outcome for them would be if those puts expired worthless. When you insure your house, you don't usually wish for it to burn down. I haven't acted and my portfolio took a -30% hit right after. Your suggestion (to change the portfolio allocation) would mean…

How does holding money have an "unlimited loss potential"? You just buy back at whatever value the stock is at the time. I would argue that money is a neutral position (adjusting for inflation which is nowadays quite low). After all, we buy stuff with money, not stock. Now, selling short, that has an unlimited loss potential, but it's very very different from a cash position.

It’s unlimited because in the time he is holding cash there’s no limit to the amount the stock market could increase. If he sells a stock for $10, and then it goes from $10 to $10,000 he’ll only be able to buy back 1/1,000th of what he had. He lost $9,990.

It’s the same as writing call options. There’s defined upside and unlimited downside.

Re: How to Lose Money

#119

Post by xwdv » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:29 PM UTC

I used to lose money so consistently buying options I thought, “Hey, I should sell options”. Now I make money pretty consistently.

Re: How to Lose Money

#120

Post by ronyfadel » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 1:31 PM UTC

xxs wrote: post #108

ronyfadel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. A Comp Sci./Eng. degree is pretty much guaranteed to get you a decently paying job. My ROI has been > 20x. Learning a 3-5 yr curriculum on your own is a surefire way to get you demotivated and/or depressed.

>Learning a 3-5 yr curriculum You don't need that to find a decent job. Most developer/programmer jobs have very little to do with comp. sci (which is math) and a lot more with practical application of few select skills.

While you don't need it, it definitely helps you throughout your career.

Not the degree per se (the piece of paper), but the breadth of what you learn.

I find most people who have "really made it" without a degree to be exceptionally bright and wouldn't have needed the push/discipline of a college education anyways.